


your hamlet of eight hundred people or less: the first one

by dudski



Series: your hamlet of eight hundred people or less [1]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Law Enforcement, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudski/pseuds/dudski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Artemis is an FBI agent. Wally's a forensic anthropologist. THEY CATCH MURDERERS!</p>
            </blockquote>





	your hamlet of eight hundred people or less: the first one

**Author's Note:**

> For torigates! Obviously none of this would be mine anyway, but in this case it's EXTRA not mine, since this entire thing basically just rips off the pilot of Bones.

Wally hefts his bag over his shoulder and quickly scans the area. Dick’s nowhere in sight, and Wally sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. He had a long flight after a long couple of weeks in Guatemala, and he just wants to go home, get cleaned up, order a pizza, and pass out for a while before heading back into work. Roy’s a great assistant and Wally trusts him completely, but there’s still no telling what kind of damage whatever incompetent replacement Kaldur brought in has been doing to Wally’s perfectly ordered lab.

Dick’s not answering his phone, and Wally wanders around the arrivals area for a few minutes before he hears the telltale sound of giggling and changes direction. Sure enough, there’s Dick, standing at an information counter, shirt held up while the airline rep pokes at his abs.

“Now can you tell me where to find the flight from Guatemala?” asks Dick, who clearly doesn’t mind jumping through a few probably-not-company-policy hoops for the information.

“Please tell me you tried _asking_ first,” says Wally.

Dick spins around, grinning. “Wally! There you are. Tricia here was just...”

“I’m sure.” Wally grins. “It’s good to see you, dude. I hate to interrupt, but can we get going?”

“Yeah, sure thing,” says Dick. He turned back to the counter and grins at Tricia. “Is there a number I should call if I have any more questions?”

Wally, who obviously has the patience of a _saint_ , is watching Tricia blush and tap her number into Dick’s phone when someone grabs Wally’s arm and yanks, hard. Wally doesn’t even think, just reacts, and before he really knows what’s happened, he’s got the guy pinned to the ground. He’s feeling pretty proud of himself when he looks up and notices that there are an awful lot of airport security goons pointing guns at him.

Wally’s never going to get that pizza.

xx

“I can’t _believe_ you,” Wally bites out once Crock is driving them away from the airport. “You told them I was a potential terrorist? What if they’d shot me?”

“First of all,” she says, “I said you were a person of interest. Second of all, they definitely wouldn’t have shot you. Probably.”

“Oh, _probably_ , that’s very reassuring. Pull over.”

“What? No. You’re coming to headquarters.”

“No, I’m going home.”

“We need a squint for this case, and you’re the only one who--”

“Seriously? That’s your angle? Get me to help you by calling me a--”

“You know what I meant, and you know I wouldn’t even have come to you if it weren’t important. I could always just go to Dr. Durham and have him make you assist, if you can’t be bothered to help just because it’s the right thing to--”

“ _Please_ ," he says, and the exhaustion in his voice must get through to her, because she seems to be listening to him for once. “It’s been a long couple of days at the end of a long month, and I just need one night. One night to sit on my couch, and feel like a person, and sleep in my own bed, and then in the morning you can come and kidnap me and lock me up in a terribly-equipped FBI lab and call me a squint as much as you want. Please, Artemis.”

“Okay,” she says after a long moment. “I can do that. But I’m picking you up at six.”

“Six? What part of _morning_ didn’t you understand?”

Crock doesn’t respond, just glances over at him and raises an eyebrow.

“Fine.” He slouches down in the passenger seat. “But I’m not using your crappy lab.”

xx

Technically, Wally’s known Agent Crock for three years, but they haven’t really been in contact for most of it. The first time he ever consulted for the FBI, it was on one of her cases. She was the one who sought him out, so despite all her disparaging talk about “squints,” he at least knows she can recognize and respect genius when she sees it.

The Bureau’s brought him in to consult since, but never on one of her cases. Sometimes they pass each other in the hall when he stops by headquarters, but there’s no small talk, no greeting, just quick nods of acknowledgement if they can’t manage to avoid eye contact.

Their one shared case was, by Bureau standards, a resounding success. Wally knows for a fact that the one thing he and Crock have in common is that they don’t like to talk about it.

xx

“What we’ve done,” says Dick, who’s always been better than Wally at explaining their work to people without PhDs, “is to use my imaging program to reconstruct what the victim looked. Wally reassembled the skull fragments--”

“What, by hand? The skull was in hundreds of pieces,” Crock says.

“Dr. West is an expert,” Roy says, glaring at her. Wally and Crock have their differences, but Roy _hates_ her. It’s pretty funny, honestly.

“Anyway,” says Dick, trying not to laugh, “after Dr. West reassembled the skull and provided me with tissue markers, I used the Dickerator--”

“ _No_ ,” says Wally. “I told you, if you want to name the equipment after yourself, you’re using your last name.”

“--to generate a three-dimensional model of the victim.”

xx

It’s touch and go, but it all comes together in the end. Wally kind of sort of gets officially reprimanded for shooting a guy in the leg, but he was a murderer, and Wally stopped him from burning up all the evidence, didn’t he? Crock’s boss flipped out over it, yelled something about how this was why you didn’t bring squints into the field, and Wally got the shock of his life when, instead of apologizing and agreeing and saying Wally was a liability, Crock defended him and said they never would have figured it out if he hadn’t done what he did.

Director Wayne hates being disagreed with almost as much as he hates Wally. It was not a comfortable silence.

Whatever weird staring match they had, though, Crock apparently won, because Wayne just sighed and said he’d been instructed to create an official joint partnership between the Bureau and the Jeffersonian.

And that’s how Wally found out his boss basically leased him to the FBI.  
xx

“Cleo Eller was my first unsolved case,” Crock tells him after the funeral, after they’ve been walking in silence for a while. “I didn’t...it’s classified, what I was doing before I joined the Bureau, but you know I was a sniper. Distance is sort of the point, and I’d never been up close and personal with a case before that. I got to know her parents, and I knew better than to promise them anything other than that I’d try my best. Not being able to give them answers, not being able to even give them the closure of a body, it was... Thank you. Thank you for giving them that. I know you don’t really have a choice about working with the FBI, but you’ll be helping a lot of families like the Ellers.”

Wally doesn’t say anything for a long time.They’re not good at this; they’ve never been able to meet in the middle unless they were colliding, but she’s making the effort, and he owes her something real for that.

“My uncle Barry and his wife disappeared when I was sixteen,” he tells her. “They lived next door, and he was like a second father to me, and then one day they were just...gone, and nobody was ever able to figure out what happened to them.” She has to know about this, he has no doubt that the FBI’s got a file on him that’s probably got more detail than he even knows about himself. She’s probably read all about it, about the investigation that went nowhere, about how Wally had totally failed to cope, probably already knows where he’s going with this.

He keeps talking anyway.

“I used to want to be a physicist or something, to make discoveries that changed how people understood the universe, but after that...I just kept thinking that someone should have been able to figure it out. There was no way the evidence wasn’t there, if only someone knew what to look for. Someone like me, I guess. So you don’t need to thank me, it’s...I’m glad to help.”

Crock nods, then stops and sticks her hand out to him. “Partners?”

“Partners,” he says, shaking her hand.

“Do you think we can work together without killing each other?”

“Probably not.”

“No, probably not,” she agrees, and grins at him. “But if it comes to that, at least I know I can take you.”

“No argument here.” This is a terrible idea. Wally grins back anyway.


End file.
